Cinematic and operatic, Manhattan reinvents itself more readily than perhaps any other metropolis on earth. The city is continually in flux, and any establishment that manages to survive here for more than a few years earns its status as a cherished classic.

Yet even on this adrenaline-charged island—the best known of New York City's five boroughs—the last few years have been particularly transformational. From the still-unresolved trauma at Ground Zero to the vertiginous highs and lows of Wall Street, Manhattan is, more than ever, in a period of transition. For some New Yorkers, this never-ending cycle of creative destruction has a Darwinian purpose. "In a down market, people, stores, restaurants, galleries, and even street hustlers have to be more inventive to survive," says Andy Spade, the founder and former designer of Jack Spade (and husband of designer Kate), who now runs Partners & Spade, a branding agency as well as an art gallery/shop in NoHo. "A lot of people were able to coast on mediocrity during the boom years."

Diane von Furstenberg, who, as the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America is an important advocate for one of Manhattan's core industries, puts a more positive spin on the same sentiment: "This is an extremely fertile moment for New York," she says. "The recession has inspired people to stand out as unique and special and has sparked a huge wave of creativity."

A visitor in search of the city's pulse might start with a trip to the High Line. In 1999, two residents of the far west side, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, hatched a seemingly quixotic plan to save a rusting 1930s elevated freight-train track from demolition and transform it into an urban park along the lines of Paris's Promenade Plantée. A decade of red tape and fundraising later, the first glorious section of the High Line—nine blocks that stretch from the meatpacking district to the Chelsea neighborhood—was unveiled to the public this past June (the park will eventually extend to 34th Street). From its opening day, New Yorkers and tourists alike have descended in droves to stroll this urban boardwalk with its naturalistic plantings and rapturous views, taking breaks to chat, dine, and soak up the sun on the wooden chaise longues whose metal wheels attach to the old train tracks.

The promenade grazes the sides of buildings when it doesn't literally bore through them. Look up and you are peering into the clear glass windows of André Balazs's sexy new Standard hotel, which straddles the High Line. Look west, past the graffitied walls of this postindustrial landscape, and the panorama encompasses the Hudson River. To the east, the raised vantage point affords a levitating view of the streets.

"There was a time you would go to a park to escape the city," says architect Ricardo Scofidio of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which collaborated on the High Line with the landscape-architecture firm James Corner Field Operations. "The High Line is a park where you go to enjoy the urban landscape and to see it in a new way."

Just a few years ago, not many people could have imagined this industrial corridor as the setting for two of Manhattan's most exciting neighborhoods. Yet in less than a decade, the meatpacking district, for many years the center of hardworking commercial butchers, has been transformed into a glamorous enclave of high-end stores, crowded restaurants, and throbbing nightlife. A few blocks north, warehouses that once serviced the nearby Hudson piers are now home to West Chelsea's hundreds of galleries, supplanting SoHo as the center of New York's art scene.

It's a story that has been repeated in almost every corner of Manhattan. The northern edge of Little Italy, once a bastion of cannoli and pasta, has morphed into NoLIta, a fashionista favorite for its boutiques and hip cafés.

On the Lower East Side, kosher delis and blintz houses have given way to gourmet eateries like Falai, wd-50, and Frankies 17 Spuntino, while tenements have yielded to gleaming apartment towers. The Bowery, once the seediest of New York thoroughfares, now boasts the New Museum's dramatic tower by the Japanese architecture firm SANAA, a John Varvatos men's clothing store (which has replaced the late and lamented rock club CBGB), and chef Daniel Boulud's latest venture, DBGB Kitchen and Bar, where the decor echoes the area's other longtime mainstay, restaurant-supply stores.

Meanwhile, who would have thought that Times Square's metamorphosis from sleaze central into a family-friendly destination would culminate in a new pedestrian mall, complete with lawn chairs for lounging in the middle of Broadway's traffic-free zone?

Ask any of Manhattan's 1.6 million residents, and they'll tell you one of the city's prime pleasures is simply walking around. "Stand on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, go to Chinatown, wander through Central Park," says illustrator-author Maira Kalman. "For that matter, stand on the corner of 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, or 96th Street and Amsterdam, or 42nd Street and Broadway. Look at the architecture, look at the people."

Madeline Weinrib, the textile designer whose family owns ABC Carpet & Home, the captivating home-furnishings emporium, recalls a time in the late 1980s when crime made many blocks too dangerous for strolling. "Now every inch is vital, and Manhattan has become a city of neighborhoods," she notes. "From Wall Street to the West Side Highway, everything is user-friendly." The canyons of Wall Street have been redubbed FiDi (short for Financial District) and become a 24-hour community of apartment towers, chic stores—including Hermès and Tiffany & Co.—and bustling restaurants and cafés.

The island has also embraced its rivers. Commuter ferries zip back and forth across both the East River and the Hudson. And almost the entire length of the west-side waterfront has been remade with gardens and pathways, the rotting piers dismantled and transformed into recreation areas. As crowded as the West Side Highway might be, there seem to be nearly as many runners, bicyclists, and pedestrians as cars.

Even Manhattan's long-standing uptown-downtown divide is beginning to dissolve, as both locals and visitors find reasons to traverse the borough. The gutsy programming of director Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem has made that small institution the cultural axis of a thriving and cosmopolitan community. On the Upper East Side, the Neue Galerie, in a Carrère & Hastings mansion once home to a member of the Vanderbilt family, specializes in exquisite shows of early-20th-century German and Austrian art and design. The museum's Viennese-style Café Sabarsky, with its Adolf Loos furnishings and Josef Hoffmann light fixtures, is one of the prettiest lunch spots in the city—and certainly the one with the best strudel.

"I always send my visitors uptown to stay at the St. Regis," says Jeffrey Kalinsky, the Charleston, South Carolina, native whose designer boutique, Jeffrey, was an early anchor of 14th Street's couture row in the meatpacking district. "I used to stay there ten years ago when I lived in Atlanta and was setting up the store. Then and now, being uptown never stopped me from going downtown in the evening. The hotel is old-fashioned, but it's nice to come home to at night."

Perhaps it is the fear of losing the city's past in the face of all this regeneration that is augmenting a fondness for familiar institutions. It certainly seems to be inspiring another Manhattan trend: an urge to turn back the clock. Old-school is in, from Art Deco jive joints like Harlem's Lenox Lounge to vintage hotel bars like the King Cole at the St. Regis, where the Bloody Mary was perfected 75 years ago this month, or the beloved Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle. "It's not just the economy," says interior designer Robin Standefer of Roman and Williams, who, with her partner Stephen Alesch, cribbed from the decor of old New York steak houses and delicatessens to give the Standard Grill in the Balazs hotel its instant patina. "New York was already on the cusp of changing," she says. "Manhattanites were bored with disposable and trendy. Today, they are looking for things that last."

Even the reigning kings of New York nightlife have circled back. After their success with the Waverly Inn downtown, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and architect Basil Walter linked up with hotelier Jeff Klein and restaurateur Jeremy King to give new life to the faded '30s midtown boîte the Monkey Bar, preserving the painted cavorting monkeys while transforming it into one of the hottest scenes in town. Guests vie for banquettes below an Edward Sorel mural of iconic New Yorkers (tip: if you're seated below Babe Ruth, you've made it). "It's a classic New York nightspot—glamorous, raffish, and cozy," Carter says. "I can't tell you how many people tell me stories about how their parents were Monkey Bar regulars, and now they are too." And at the Minetta Tavern in Greenwich Village, Keith McNally—the man behind Balthazar and Pastis—has made a 72-year-old saloon into one of the city's most sought-after restaurants.

Downtown, a stylish young crowd is time-traveling even further into the past. At the Bowery Hotel, on a strip formerly known primarily for its derelicts and soup kitchens, the interior is crammed with velvet-mohair sofas, timbered ceilings, Moorish arches, and cabinets filled with dusty bottles and books. Nearby, Freemans Alley, a tiny dead-end street on the Lower East Side, has been transformed into a stage set out of Gangs of New York, complete with a barber shop, men's store, and a restaurant and bar festooned with antlers and deer heads to emulate the ambience of a tavern from two centuries ago.

Is there any visitor to Manhattan who can resist the urge to shop? Here too the borough is unparalleled, with options ranging from the sprawling department stores—Macy's, which bills itself as the world's largest, has just been joined in Herald Square by a brand-new JCPenney—to specialty stores such as Bergdorf Goodman, where the sumptuous seventh floor features vintage hotel silver and Limoges porcelain (the Jimmy Choos are on two), and Barneys New York, with its own chic home area full of Fornasetti plates and R&Y Augousti shagreen-covered boxes.

Manhattan also contains a branch of any chain store you might desire, from H&M to J.Crew, from Home Depot to Williams-Sonoma. But what's truly special here are the hundreds of designer shops and small boutiques spread throughout the island. These carefully curated collections reflect the passions, knowledge, and vision of their owners, whether they're fashion focused, like the Zero + Maria Cornejo stores in NoHo and the West Village and Kirna Zabête in SoHo, or home oriented, like Paula Rubenstein and Aero in SoHo and Gerald Bland and Amy Perlin Antiques on the Upper East Side. "I love stores like Lobel Modern, John Derian, 1950, and Antik," says actress Julianne Moore, whose Greenwich Village townhouse is filled with midcentury-modern furniture. "The owners not only have a great aesthetic, I've come to admire them personally as well."

And the changes go on. The SoHo corner of Howard and Crosby streets, obscure even to many longtime residents, has gradually become a style destination, with furniture-design firm BDDW, jeweler Ted Muehling, fashion-forward boutique Opening Ceremony, and the rarefied design shop de Vera recently joined by outposts of Jil Sander and Derek Lam.

Old or new, east or west, uptown or down, Manhattan thrums with intensity. "Everything is all the time and more, more, more," says designer and potter Jonathan Adler, who has opened four stores in Manhattan in the past few years (meanwhile, his latest is in that other booming New York City borough-metropolis, Brooklyn). "I get so much stimulation from just walking down the street that at the end of the day, all I want to do is go home and calm down from all the excitement." Any visitor who takes advantage of even a fraction of all that Manhattan has to offer can surely relate.

Rise up. Walk the High Line (500-6035; thehighline.org). The first section of this elevated railway turned park just opened and is already a hit. Uptown, the Peninsula New York's rooftop (700 Fifth Ave., 956-2888; peninsula.com) offers glittering nighttime views.

Experience a Harlem Renaissance. Take in new works by African-American artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem (144 W. 125th St., 864-4500; studiomuseum.org). At Melba's Restaurant (300 W. 114th St., 864-7777; melbasrestaurant.com), regulars such as Ashanti enjoy soul-food dishes like chicken and waffles in a stylish setting.

Get dramatic. Hollywood has rediscovered the Great White Way. Star turns this fall include Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig in A Steady Rain, Jude Law in Hamlet, and Carrie Fisher in her own Wishful Drinking.

Neue Galerie New York, 1048 Fifth Ave., 628-6200; neuegalerie.org: A mansion elegantly renovated by Annabelle Selldorf is now devoted to early-20th-century German and Austrian painting and decorative arts. The gift shop is among the best in town.

The New Museum, 235 Bowery, 219-1222; newmuseum.org: Tokyo-based architects SANAA created a striking stacked-box design for this institution devoted to cutting-edge art.

The Bowery Hotel, 335 Bowery, 505-9100; theboweryhotel.com: Its fabled louche setting belies its luxury—accommodations include marble baths, ceiling fans, and views of old New York.

The Carlyle, 35 E. 76th St., 744-1600; thecarlyle.com: Home to the beloved Bemelmans Bar, this Deco delight offers lavish rooms and suites (some even have Steinway pianos) and a spa designed by Mark Zeff.

Crosby Street Hotel, 79 Crosby St., 226-6400; crosbystreethotel.com: This first U.S. property by London-based Firmdale Hotels has art-filled interiors and an organic garden.

The Mark, 25 E. 77th St., 744-4300; themarkhotel.com: Decorator Jacques Grange and antiquaire Pierre Passebon have just completed a luxe renovation of this East Side stalwart.

The St. Regis New York, 2 E. 55th St., 753-4500; stregis.com/newyork: This midtown icon is now even more chichi thanks to a redesign by Sills Huniford Assoc.

The Standard, New York, 848 Washington St., 645-4646; standardhotels.com: The High Line runs through it; the rooms are midcentury-modern-inspired; and its vaulted-ceiling eatery, the Standard Grill, features a floor of pennies and chef Dan Silverman's haute-chophouse fare.

WHERE TO EAT

Freemans, end of Freeman Alley, 420-0012; freemansrestaurant.com: Classic cocktails and hearty fare in an old-tavern-style room.

The Mermaid Inn, 96 Second Ave., 674-5870; themermaidnyc.com: A citified clam shack with a full oyster bar and an upscale fish fry.

Momofuku Noodle Bar, 171 First Ave., 777-7773; momofuku.com: David Chang's maverick take on ramen and Asian street food has made this minimally decorated eatery and its siblings (Ssam Bar, 207 Second Ave., 254-3500; and Ko, 163 First Ave., 500-0831) among the hottest spots in town.

Muji, 16 W. 19th St., 414-9024; muji.us: This Japanese chain, with its low-key, perfectly calibrated tools, accessories, furniture, fashion, and bedding, has won over Manhattan with stores in SoHo and Times Square; the Chelsea outpost is its newest.